Saving Truth From Paradox

Hartry Field

Field is one of the world's leading philosophers; this is his first monograph since 1980

Comprehensive treatment of semantic and related paradoxes

Saving Truth From Paradox

Hartry Field

Description

Saving Truth from Paradox is an ambitious investigation into paradoxes of truth and related issues, with occasional forays into notions such as vagueness, the nature of validity, and the G:odel incompleteness theorems. Hartry Field presents a new approach to the paradoxes and provides a systematic and detailed account of the main competing approaches.

Part One examines Tarski's, Kripke's, and Lukasiewicz's theories of truth, and discusses validity and soundness, and vagueness. Part Two considers a wide range of attempts to resolve the paradoxes within classical logic. In Part Three Field turns to non-classical theories of truth that that restrict excluded middle. He shows that there are theories of this sort in which the conditionals obey many of the
classical laws, and that all the semantic paradoxes (not just the simplest ones) can be handled consistently with the naive theory of truth. In Part Four, these theories are extended to the property-theoretic paradoxes and to various other paradoxes, and some issues about the understanding of the notion of validity are addressed. Extended paradoxes, involving the notion of determinate truth, are treated very thoroughly, and a number of different arguments that the theories lead to "revenge problems" are addressed. Finally, Part Five deals with dialetheic approaches to the paradoxes: approaches which, instead of restricting excluded middle, accept certain contradictions but alter classical logic so as to keep them confined to a relatively remote part of the language. Advocates of dialetheic
theories have argued them to be better than theories that restrict excluded middle, for instance over issues related to the incompleteness theorems and in avoiding revenge problems. Field argues that dialetheists' claims on behalf of their theories are quite unfounded, and indeed that on some of these issues all current versions of dialetheism do substantially worse than the best theories that restrict excluded middle.

Saving Truth From Paradox

Hartry Field

Table of Contents

PrefaceIntroductionPART ONE: A Selective Background 1. Chapter 1: Self-Reference and Tarski>'s Theorem2. Validity and the Unprovability of Soundness3. Kripke>'s Theory of Truth (Strong Kleene Version)4. Adding a Conditional? Curry and Lukasiewicz5. Interlude on Vagueness, and the Paradoxes of König and BerryPART TWO: Broadly Classical Approaches 6. Introduction to the broadly classical options7. Truth-Value Gaps in Classical Theories8. Truth-value Gluts in Classical Theories9. A Second Interlude on Vagueness10. Introduction to Supervaluational Approaches to Paradox11. A Survey of Supervaluational and Revision-Rule Theories12. Are Supervaluational and Revision Theories Self-Undermining?13. Intersubstitutivity and the Purpose of Truth14. Stratified and Contextual TheoriesStratified and Contextual Theories 15. What Is To Be Done?16. Fixed Points and Revision Rules for Conditionals17. More on Revision-theoretic Conditionals18. What Has Been DonePART FOUR: More on Paracomplete Solutions 19. Validity, Truth-Preservation and the Second Incompleteness Theorem20. Other Paradoxes21. Do Paracomplete Solutions Depend on Expressive Limitations?22. Determinateness, Hyper-determinateness, Super-Determinateness and RevengePART FIVE: Paraconsistent Dialetheism 23. An Introduction to Paraconsistent Dialetheism24. Some Dialetheic Theories25. Paraconsistent Dialetheism and Soundness26.
Hyper-determinacy and revengeBibliography